If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive
Interpretation
Self-definition is crucial to avoid being shaped by others' expectations.
This quote emphasizes the importance of self-identity and personal autonomy. Audre Lorde warns that if individuals do not take the initiative to define who they are, they risk being molded by the perceptions and fantasies of others, which can lead to a loss of individuality and a sense of being overwhelmed by external pressures.
In practice
This quote can inspire students in a graduation speech about embracing their own identities.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.
If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion.And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now.
We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
The Fondness we have for Self, and the Relation which other Persons and Things have to ourselves, furnish us with another long Rank of Prejudices.
Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one's belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.
Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.
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